Awkward but Immortal

Published: September 30, 1990

(Page 2 of 2)

What united Mencken and Dreiser was the common sense of German ancestry for which they were to be condemned in 1917-18. It was this, Mr. Lingeman shows, that actually radicalized Dreiser for the first time. Earlier, he was capable of identifying himself with the ruthless force of the outrageous American magnate Charles T. Yerkes, whom he named Cowperwood in ''The Financier'' and ''The Titan.'' At a time when to enjoy ''Sister Carrie'' and ''Jennie Gerhardt'' was to defy every literary pundit in the land, Mencken lavishly praised Dreiser for inaugurating a brave new spirit in American fiction. You get a perfect reflection of what Dreiser was up against in the horror over ''Jennie Gerhardt'' expressed by Edwin Markham, poet of the hard-pressed American peasantry in ''The Man With the Hoe'': ''Is a woman ever justified in smirching her womanhood, in staining her virtue, in order to help her relatives - even to save them from starvation? This must be answered with an iron 'No' by all who take a deep look into life. The wise are aware that there are some misfortunes that are worse than starvation.''

Mencken, with his contempt for the prevailing ethos, found such ''reverential seriousness'' in ''Jennie Gerhardt'' ''that one can scarcely imagine an American writing it.'' He put the case for Dreiser in a way that perfectly defines the sense of opposition to the culture at large that Mencken was to capitalize on as a satirist but which kept Dreiser a sort of victim. He got from ''Jennie'' ''a powerful effect of reality, stark and unashamed. It is drab and gloomy, but so is the struggle for existence. It is without humor, but so are the jests of that great comedian who shoots at our heels and makes us do our grotesque dancing.''

Mencken was not to admire ''An American Tragedy,'' and would grieve Dreiser beyond words by writing a hostile review. Dreiser's greatest book demands for its appreciation a sense of how Americans are duped by ''success,'' a sense that was altogether foreign to Mencken's essential complacency. Mr. Lingeman is properly most intense and useful in discussing ''An American Tragedy.'' The book was Dreiser's one great public triumph, the one book in a lifetime of financial anxiety to give him any real money. Thanks to the ''liberated'' taste of the 20's, the book was recognized on every hand, not least in Europe, as the definite response to an economic civilization hypnotized by ''success'' and ''position'' as the only ideals in sight. ''I call it 'An American Tragedy,' '' Dreiser said when his publisher, Horace Liveright, worried over the title, ''because it could not happen in any other country in the world.''

Alas, the success of the book was the peak of Dreiser's painfully arduous life. The old instinct of opposition, of contrariness in all things great and small, political and sexual, became incoherent and farcical. Only Theodore Dreiser, that great enemy of American illusion, could have managed to die in Hollywood a churchgoer and a member of the Communist Party (he joined in the last months of his life), and to be buried in the ''Whispering Pines'' section of that Disneyland among cemeteries, Forest Lawn.

Dreiser's was truly ''An American Journey,'' from his desperate childhood in Indiana in the 1870's to his pathetic end in Hollywood. Lingeman recounts it all, all, in his solid two volumes. Dreiser had as many scrapes with publishers as he did with women (the women usually loved him back); the too complete account of both finally becomes just too much. This is what people have always said about Dreiser - he was just too, too much - and I have the impression that the biographer became a little tired putting everything in. There is a definite slackness to his prose here, as if some of Dreiser's proverbial awkwardness had entered into the book along with the peril of his life.

Still, the man ''who lacked everything but genius'' did have genius of a sort. If Dreiser's peculiar gift is not analyzed and explained here, Mr. Lingeman is not alone in this. It may be that Dreiser was ultimately not just a critic of American society but so profoundly alienated that he stood outside of everything we are used to and mechanically accept. This makes it nearly impossible to analyze him in depth. In the days when his candor about sex made a reviewer in The New York Times distrust him as ''abnormal,'' it was not as clear as it is now that Dreiser was not so much a rebel as a total stranger to all our ways. What tormented him more than capitalism and the desire for women was the total lack of meaning he saw in this earthly life. Marguerite Tjader Harris, Dreiser's literary companion in later years, said that there were ''those veiled mysterious forces of darkness that he had believed in almost more than forces of Light . . . the weird, the inexplicable, the evil, even the super-evil.'' The point is that he suffered this as no other modern American novelist has thought necessary. And brought it directly into his work.

HE ROSE AGAINST THE WIND

Writers had abandoned the social novel, and were retreating into subjectivity, he declared. . . . Dreiser apprenticed on the expansive novels of the Victorian era. He could not fully appreciate how much the 1920s writers' rebellion against the Victorian masters was a rebellion in form. Substance was part of it in a negative sense: the young rebels had no desire to expose or describe social evils. And so they turned to language and technique, as well as greater psychological depth, reflecting private disillusionment and hurt.

Caught between the Victorian and modern age, Dreiser in his Tragedy was writing a large-canvas novel documenting American society and its false values. Though he was sensitive to the changes in those values, Dreiser, unlike the writers who emerged in the 1920s, could not believe that the old idols were shattered. His entire career had been one of struggle against the reticence of the genteel tradition and official censors and popular taste; he had defined himself by opposition. As he wrote David Karsner in December 1923, ''Like a kite I have risen against the wind - not with it.'' He needed the wind to keep aloft.

And so he found himself something of a troglodyte, and this revealed itself in his lack of sympathy with methods of the new writers, though it was not a simple hostility, for he admired some of them, such as Evelyn Scott, an English novelist published by Liveright, whose truthfulness he liked, but ''not her bitterness.''

From ''Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey 1908-1945.''

A METICULOUS FIRST VOLUME

The first installment of Richard Lingeman's biography of Dreiser - ''At the Gates of the City 1871-1907'' - was published in 1986. In these pages, Cynthia Ozick found it ''scrupulously, massively - devotedly - constructed; everything is in it, including a clear passion for the social issues.'' It came to an ''appropriate biographical climax'' with the reissuing of ''Sister Carrie'' and its success ''in the wake of early neglect.'' And, Ms. Ozick wrote, ''the meticulous account of Dreiser's work history - covering Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, a progression of cities in growth - yields . . . a masterly impressionist history of American journalism in the pre-eminent age of newspapers.''